Students, Postdoc Place Third in Life Sciences Consultancy Competition

Submitted by admin on Thu, 10/11/2018 - 10:22

Badger Business Solutions — a team of graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher representing the departments and programs of Biochemistry, Chemistry, Food Science, and Biophysics — won third place at the Tufts New England Case Competition (TUNECC) on Friday, Aug. 3, 2018. The team included Munish Chhabra, a biophysics Ph.D. student in the lab of chemistry professor Tom Record; Alex Harwig, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of biochemistry professor Bob Landick; Jennifer Yao, a Biophysics Ph.D. student in the lab of chemistry professor Sam Gellman; and Jonathan Valdez, a master’s student in the Department of Food Science.

Members of the team learned how to analyze and make recommendations based on quarterly reports and financial and scientific documents. They also learned how to work on teams and about what careers exist outside of academia. “As a graduate student, you are often working alone on your own project so being able to work on a team was a great learning experience,” Yao says. “I learned to trust the analysis and expertise of my teammates.”
“It was great to compete as a school from the Midwest and I opened our presentation with ‘We are Badger Business Solutions and have flown all the way from Madison, Wisconsin to help Seres Therapeutics in the TUNECC 2018 competition,’ ” Chhabra says. “I think the judges were impressed we had come all that way. We were very proud to represent UW–Madison from the Midwest.”